Indian Government Aiming to Install Over 5 Lakh WiFi Hotspots by This Year End: Telecom Secretary

The Indian government is preparing to give a major push to its national Wi-Fi rollout plan by increasing the total WiFi hotspot count from 38,000 to over 5 lakh hotspots across the country. The Wi-Fi rollout will be supported by the second phase of the BharatNet project.

“The second phase in many ways will be a game changer, one because of the big Wi-Fi rollout that we are targeting, that is by the end of this year we should go up to 5 lakh Wi-Fi hotspots from 38,000,” Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said in an interview. She added that the plan is to provide at least one Wi-Fi hotspot in every single village of the country.

The government will also use the models of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to deliver broadband through cable.

Sundararajan told the Economic Times that the new Telecom policy would focus on fiberisation in urban parts of the country, even as the BharatNet Project continues to connect rural parts. Fiberisation, according to analysts, will not only help telco take broadband to the home, but also help them in offload data from wireless networks which are seeing congestion in urban parts of the country. Furthermore, fiberisation is said to help telcos create a sound backhaul for the 5G technology.

“We will have to benchmark how much fiber we are putting in every day to achieve 4G and 5G. So, it has to become a national priority, with state governments and municipalities recognising it. Tower providers have been asking for the right of way and to be recognised as infrastructure providers, although the notification is yet to come. We are looking at giving a big fillip to that in the coming policy because tower industry and fiber are equally important for India,” she was quoted as saying.

In a separate interaction with Mint, the secretary said that the first draft of the national telecom policy would be ready by the end of this year, which will then be put up for public consultation.

The regulator, Trai, had its first open house on new telecom policy this week, while the second open house will happen on 24 January.

WiFi Hotspots is hardly is a proper solution. Efficient use of cellular spectrum is most appropriate. Despite Libralizing 4G spectrum most operators still hesitate to move 3G to 4G. Also, 700Mhz premium with great indoor coverage wasn’t even sold! Hardly Indian scenario leads to some 5Mhz in 850Mhz(Jio) or 3Mhz in airtel 4G-900Mhz. Whereas actual tech evolves like US – T-Mobile has covered 600Mhz with 50Mhz! But Indian OEMs don’t even enable CA on flagships and mostly they have no clue what is all these mean! Atleast expecting Jio-Rcom 850Mhz merger to make out 10Mhz to improve Data speeds in… Read more »

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Kiran Fernandes | Mumbai

“Aiming”
Problem is, the government keeps aiming but there’s barely any action.